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Incurable
John Marsden continues his best-selling Tomorrow series, with the second instalment of the post-war Ellie Chronicles. Incurable continues the story of Ellie, Lee, Homer, Jess and their respective families and friends after the War has scaled down in their regional town. It seems Foreign troops are still present and dominant in Australia, but their focus has turned to big cities, so Wirrawee is returning to a semblance of normality, with more mundane problems. While Ellie has new responsibilities as guardian of Gavin, and the challenge of keeping the farm going on her own, she is still only high school student, and has many life lessons ahead of her. Despite Ellie’s best efforts to concentrate on her domestic responsibilities, Lee, Homer, and Ellie’s new love interest Jeremy are still active members of the secretive liberation front, acting on instructions from a mysterious leader known as the Scarlet Pimple. Ellie finds herself drawn back into the guerrilla activities, using her skills and instinct to get the boys out of yet another dangerous situation. I’ll admit to not having read While I Live, however the familiar style and voice of Ellie - that has perhaps become John Marsden’s indelible imprint on young-adult fiction – was easy to fall back into. The landscape of rural Wirrawee has been changed by the War, yet it was easy to slip back into the imaginary setting the originals books had conjured so many years before. As a reader who followed the Tomorrow series from its first publication date in 1993, I find it a little jarring to still be reading, more than ten years later, about a character who seems to have aged only a few years on the page. While I have grown up and moved on with my life, it’s a little disappointing to pick up the Ellie Chronicles and find I am reading about a character that is still written as a teenager. When the series began, Ellie’s character faced challenges and interpersonal relationships way beyond her years, yet she seems to have resolved very few of them – particularly the relationship dynamics between herself, Lee and Homer – over the course of the novels. Having said that, I still regard John Marsden’s novels, particularly the Tomorrow series, to be the domain of older teenage readers. They many have become an icon of young-adult fiction, and feature prominently in every school and public library across the nation, but the themes and graphic events in these novels are not for immature readers. I found Incurable to be shorter than previous Tomorrow stories, although that may also be reflective of the time that has passed since I finished the original six books. While the Ellie Chronicles can be read as stand-alone stories, readers will gain the most out of the books if they have read the rest of the Tomorrow series. I expect we will see more Ellie instalments in the future – the War is far from over and many long-standing readers are waiting for some closure. http://www.theblurb.com.au/Issue62/Incurable.htm